4 Movie & TV Crossovers That Would Save Both Franchises

Every filmmaker dreams of creating an unforgettable classic, and a big part of that is coming up with a unique story no one has ever seen before -- something that would never work with any other setting or character. Or so you would think.

But as it turns out, plenty of hit movies and television series share loads of bizarrely specific similarities, to the point where you could almost believe that they take place in the same joint universe. This not only proves that originality is overrated, but also lets film nuts like myself envision mind-blowing but totally plausible pop culture crossovers, such as ...

#4. Gremlins and Little Shop of Horrors

Warner Bros.

At first glance, the only connection between Gremlins and Little Shop of Horrors is that they are both movies about rampaging monsters making people's lives miserable, which basically applies to everything from Pacific Rim to Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen.

Warner Bros."This chicken is so old and dry, it should come with a side order of menopause cream!"

Looking at the two movies more closely, the differences become even starker. Gremlins is a classic horror-comedy about cute little creatures called mogwai that, when fed after midnight, become crazed-out, slimy gremlins that want to fuck shit up, and might also be a metaphor for puberty. Little Shop of Horrors, on the other hand, is a musical about a sentient monster plant called Audrey II that wants to take over the world and eat all the humans. Other than the monster angle, there doesn't seem to be that much overlap between those stories ... but it'd be amazing if there was. Imagine it: a whole movie about two supernatural threats to humankind, one chaotic and insane, the other insidious and malevolent, joining forces to spread death and destruction like animatronic versions of the Joker and Bane.

Warner Bros."If I pull off your leaves, will you die?"
"It'd be very painful ... for you."

Why It Could Actually Work:

Now, what I said earlier about the gremlins and Audrey II being "supernatural" threats to humanity? That's not entirely accurate, because both monsters are in fact aliens.

We know as much about Audrey II thanks to the song "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space," which reveals the plant's origin as an alien species "from past the stars and beyond the moon." As for Gremlins, the official novelization of the movie explains that the mogwai were originally created on the planet Enz by an alien scientist called Mogturmen, who easily could also have been the creator of Audrey II.

Consider how the aliens only turn homicidal due to their diet. With the mogwai, it was eating after midnight. With Audrey II, it was feeding on human blood. I don't know much about biology, but I'm guessing that producing murder instead of gas due to something you ate isn't a very useful evolutionary trait, and would make more sense as the result of a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong. The Gremlins novel tells us that the mogwais transforming into gremlins was a mistake on Mogturmen's part, so we know he isn't that good of a scientist. This makes him exactly the type of guy who would also try to create a sentient plant with a mouth for reasons we probably shouldn't get into.

It's also important to note that Gizmo (the first mogwai) and Audrey II were both sold to their movie's protagonist by walking illustrations from The 1800s Encyclopedia of Oriental Races:

Warner Bros.Of course one of them is named Chang!

Unfortunately, if anyone ever did try making a story about an alien mad scientist who creates singing monsters that later land on Earth, they'd immediately get sued by Disney for ripping off Lilo & Stitch.

#3. Indiana Jones and Captain America: The First Avenger

Lucasfilm Ltd., Marvel Studios, Paramount Pictures

One movie tells the story of an adventuring superhuman trying to stop Nazis from acquiring a powerful religious artifact, while the other is ... um ... set on a different continent? OK, so Indy and the Captain do seem to have some things in common, but so does every character from the "magic Nazis" genre of film, right? Hellboy, Hellsing, Bulletproof Monk ... there are plenty of flicks out there that boil down to Nazis wanting to Avada Kedavra the world in the face and then make out with each other on top of the corpses of millions.

During his adventures, Indy comes across magical artifacts from three different religions: Judaism (the Ark of the Covenant), Christianity (the Holy Grail), and Hinduism (the Sankara stones), all of which seemingly prove the existence of a God or even multiple gods in the Indiana Jones universe. Don't you find that terrifying? See, if any religion out there is, well, right about the tenets of their faith, then that means a huge portion of the population is royally fucked. If the Jewish people are right about God, then everyone with a turtleneck wang won't be getting into Yahweh's VIP Lounge. If Christianity is right, then everyone who hasn't accepted Christ as their savior will be accepting all 666 of Satan's spiked dong-tentacles (dongtacles) immediately upon death. And I don't even want to think what happens if the Hindus are right, because I've personally exterminated whole generations of cows, one triple hamburger at a time.

This thankfully stops being a problem if all those artifacts were really alien weapons like the Tesseract.

The Tesseract was the blocky MacGuffin from Thor's planet that Red Skull, Hitler's chief of advanced weaponry, wanted to use to take over the world in Captain America: The First Avenger. However, it's later revealed that the cube is one of six Infinity Stones, alien artifacts of great power, just like, say, the Ark of the Covenant. And there you go -- this one tiny detail allows us to plausibly introduce aliens to the Indiana Jones universe while keeping Shia LaBeouf out of it. It's win-win dream-come-true for everyone.

There's another reason Indy would work well with Captain America: Their timelines match up perfectly. The final movie in the original trilogy, The Last Crusade, takes place in 1938, while Cap gets frozen and fast-forwards to the future in the 1940s. This means that canonically, both characters could have existed around the same time without running into each other. Even the first Captain America movie recognizes that, seeing as it made Red Skull utter this familiar line from Raiders of the Lost Ark:

Marvel Studios, Paramount Pictures

So the movie itself is already begging us to throw Indiana Jones into the mix and have him punch Red Skull right in the bratwurst. The only problem with such a crossover is that it wouldn't be very popular with the female demographic, because anyone lucky enough to witness such concentrated awesomeness would immediately grow a giant erection-shaped beard, regardless of their gender.